A blog about how technology is transforming media

Gmail Slow and "Still Working": Enough Is Enough!

Raise your hand if you’ve seen the dreaded “Still Working” error as Gmail takes half an hour to complete even the simplest functions.

That’s what I thought.

I love Gmail. Search and threaded conversations have changed the way I use email, making me much efficient than I ever could have imagined back in the dark days of Outlook.

But in recent weeks, Gmail has been routinely slowing to a crawl, making you want to gnaw your hand off while waiting for an email thread to expand, or a search to execute. Gmail’s scratch-your-eyes-out slowness has been attributed to the release of Gmail 2.0. It also seems they’ve been rolling out new features with live upgrades — which nobody but Google could even imagine attempting.

I’m willing to cut most web services a fair amount slack if they go down or slow down once in a while — it’s real a challenge to reproduce the always-on, always-available application experience of the desktop. But Google has more servers than god, so my expectations are just a little higher.

One reason why Google search still dominates is that it’s so consistently FAST. Clearly Google hasn’t set the same bar for its other services.